Automatic phonological coding of unattended printed words

A lexical decision response to an attended printed word can be slowed when the word is accompanied by an unattended word that is semantically related. Does this hold for an unattended word that is not related to the target word but sounds as if it is? The homophone WASTE can be shown to affect the lexical decision response to RUBBISH, but how does the incongruently related homophone WAIST affect RUBBISH? If incongruent homophones of words related to the attended word can influence processing when they are not being attended to, then it must be through automatic processing into a phonological code, either before or after lexical access. Experiment 1 reports such an effect, and it is concluded that a phonological representation is generated preattentively and influences the semantic processing of the attended word after generation of that representation. Experiment 2 confirms the effect and investigates the possibility that the effect exists because of the strategic use of phonological encoding of attended words. To discourage the use of a phonological strategy for lexical access, all nonwords were pseudohomophones. The influence persisted, however, with attended words still being affected by the presence of incongruent homophones of related words.

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